Emma Trelles

March 08, 2017

ray of sun shines directly into her hands& to my lensdrops of rain stickmudslides radio sdwinding roads through rolling mountains& yes her handsgreen algae in fish tank behind her neoncactus paddles outside window beyond tabletextured oil images on pastel wallsrich in lime & lemon huesshe picked up her nachospurchased by yrs truly from some corporatechain w/ fresco something in its name& this might have been the lastsmile I remember from herher eyes closed her wheelchairright up to that oak table one handat her mouth with a tortilla chip coveredin scallions & sour creamher left hand in her lapsoft diagonals of jutting light& her in her roomgrimaced less light but bar of lightto her hands & to my lens& I think maybe that light her father who died two months prioror maybe her motheror maybe our grandfatheror maybe her grandmotheror maybe my grandmother& then down my gaze to her chair’s wheels’shadows surrounded darkness & skeletonsof spokes casting something mysterious& shine to my lens yes shineher darkness for she disappeared to deathin this shot spoken softly awayin three ways wheels intersectingtears statues shed tears hard onestorn faces & holes fill all abjectionstorn rusted broken tearsshed & hard shadows & outsidebluest sky after hardest rainsee rain fell mostly hard& from inside heard as hardnoted as rough& outside banners wavedfrayed edges of woven spirits strung togetherthis garden of light & fire this day emerged& she worsened w my fatherin her room as I wandered this gardenof light for photos & to understandsomething abt death in this universe& fat pomegranates reflected white sun& drops of rain ran down fat globsof light dripped down to earth& in each drop suspended at itsapex before falling I thought that’sduration right there& over yonder fountains splashed watershining sun for my delightas I thought again yet back to Gloriaworsening inside& oranges for Gloria to eat I gatheredgracefully offeredto which she gracefully respondedno gracias primo mio

Santa Barbara, California: 13 January 2010

Steven Alvarez is the author of the novels in verse The Pocho Codex (2011) and The Xicano Genome (2013), both published by Editorial Paroxismo. He has also authored two chapbooks, Six Poems from the Codex Mojaodicus (2014, winner of the Seven Kitchens Press Rane Arroyo Poetry Prize) and Un/documented, Kentucky (2016, winner of the Rusty Toque Chapbook Prize). His work has appeared in the Best Experimental Writing (BAX), Berkeley Poetry Review, The Drunken Boat, Fence, Huizache, and Waxwing.

“Because We Come from Everything: Poetry & Migration” is the first public offering of the newly formed Poetry Coalition—twenty-two organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. Coalition member Letras Latinas at Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies has partnered with the Best American Poetry blog to present ten poems in March that engage with this year’s theme, which borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, “Borderbus.” The poems in this project were curated by Francisco Aragón & Emma Trelles.

Brenda Cárdenas is the author of Boomerang (Bilingual Press, 2009) and the chapbooks Bread of the Earth/The Last Colors with Roberto Harrison (2011) and From the Tongues of Brick and Stone (2005), as well as a co-editor of Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Spuvten Duyvil Press, 2017) and Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest (2001). Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming inPOETRY, Latina/o Poetics: The Art of Poetry, The Golden Shovel Anthology, City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness, Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing, The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, Pilgrimage, RATTLE, and others. Cárdenas served as the Milwaukee Poet Laureate from 2010-2012, and in 2014, the Library of Congress recorded a reading of her work for their Spotlight on U. S. Hispanic Writers. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "On the Coast of Pedasi" was previously published in Verse Wisconsin. Issue 109. Summer, 2012 and in Cave Canem Anthology XIII: Poems 2010-2011, Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2015.

“Because We Come from Everything: Poetry & Migration” is the first public offering of the newly formed Poetry Coalition—twenty-two organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. Coalition member Letras Latinas at Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies has partnered with the Best American Poetry blog to present ten poems in March that engage with this year’s theme, which borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, “Borderbus.” The poems in this project were curated by Francisco Aragón & Emma Trelles.

Juan Felipe Herrera is the 21st Poet Laureate of the United States and is the first Latino to hold the position. From 2012-2014, Herrera served as California State Poet Laureate. Herrera’s many collections of poetry include Notes on the Assemblage;Senegal Taxi; Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, a recipient of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971-2007. He is also the author of Crashboomlove: A Novel in Verse, which received the Americas Award. His books of prose for children include: SkateFate, Calling The Doves, which won the Ezra Jack Keats Award; Upside Down Boy, which was adapted into a musical for young audiences in New York City; and Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box. Herrera is also a performance artist and activist on behalf of migrant and indigenous communities and at-risk youth. "Walking (Tenochtitlan, DF) with Francisco X. Alarcón, 1978" first appeared in Soñadores: We Came to Dream (CantoHondo/DeepSong Books, 2016), edited by Odilia Galván Rodríguez.

“Because We Come from Everything: Poetry & Migration” is the first public offering of the newly formed Poetry Coalition—twenty-two organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. Coalition member Letras Latinas at Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies has partnered with the Best American Poetry blog to present ten poems in March that engage with this year’s theme, which borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, “Borderbus.” The poems in this project were curated by Francisco Aragón & Emma Trelles.

David Dominguez holds a BA in comparative literature from the University of California at Irvine and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona. He is the author of the collections Work Done Right (University of Arizona Press) andThe Ghost of César Chávez (C&R Press). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, such as Crab Orchard Review, The Bloomsbury Review, Border Senses Literary Magazine, PALABRA a Magazine of Chicano and Latino Literary Art, Poet Lore, and Southern Review. In addition, his work has been anthologized in The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry; Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California; Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes; and Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing. New work is forthcoming in Miramar and in the anthology Latino Poetics (University of New Mexico Press, 2016). Dominguez teaches writing at Reedley College.

Rachel McKibbens is a Chicana poet and two-time New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow. She is the author of three books of poetry: Pink Elephant (Small Doggies) Into the Dark & Emptying Field (Small Doggies) and blud, forthcoming on Copper Canyon Press. In 2012, McKibbens founded The Pink Door Women’s Writing Retreat, an annual writing retreat in the US open exclusively to women of color.

Rita Maria Martinez loves all things Jane Eyre. Published by Aldrich Press, Martinez’s first full-length poetry collection, The Jane and Berthain Me, celebrates Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel—as well as the bicentenary of Brontë’s birth. Martinez’s poetry also appears in the textbook Three Genres: The Writing of Fiction / Literary Nonfiction, Poetry and Drama; and in the anthology Burnt Sugar, Caña Quemada: Contemporary Cuban Poetry inEnglish and Spanish. Martinez has been a featured author at the Miami Book Fair in Florida; at the Palabra Pura reading series in Chicago; and at the Poetry at the Dali series in St. Petersburg, Florida. Martinez is a guest contributor for the Poets & Artists blog. Visit her website here.

Ruben Quesada is the essays editor at The Rumpus, senior editor at Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and digital content editor at CantoMundo and the Latino Caucus. He is also the editor of a forthcoming volume of essays on Latino poetics from University of New Mexico Press, the author of the poetry collection Next Extinct Mammal (Greenhouse Review Press) and translator of the early 20th century Spanish poet Luis Cernuda, Exiled from the Throne of Night (Aureole Press). His poetry, prose, and short films have been featured at The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares,Stand,The California Journal of Poetics, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Poetry Foundation. He’s held fellowships and residencies at the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Vermont Studio Center, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and CantoMundo. Ruben is invested in the creation of community infrastructure and the promotion of Latino writers at all stages of their career.

Carolina Ebeid is a the author of You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior (Noemi Press, Fall 2016). She is a student in the PhD program in creative writing at the University of Denver, and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. She has won fellowships and prizes from CantoMundo, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Stadler Center for Poetry, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work appears widely in journals such as The Kenyon Review,Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, and more recent work appears in Linebreak, Bennington Review,jubilat, and in the inaugural Ruth Stone House Reader. "Homotextuality" first appeared in The Acentos Review.

So some day I was walking with Dawn. The drills gone for Sunday. My duress was

valentiney, not the deliverable package.

Torrential downplay of the giggling kind. I am sad to see you go. Then the humpbacked

lady with her such trying walked past. We walked too, but not the limping kind.

Not the body failure way. Limbed as fish or tree. Wired for longitude. We were just

loving the grand early-ness of walk. Some do. Some do.

Coincidence then with such a bomb shudder. Such like in none to see. The better part of

it in the neck and gut. The ground was as still as always but the shift made us look,

for heaven came to earth to dimple our reverie. For that when two girls crossed came one,

old. For that peculiar nod knowing where we were.

Such fatuous noise we were, but also necessary. Killing time with cigarettes. Filling in

the blade okay. Then was it.

Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir and four poetry collections— including Milk and Filth, finalist for the 2013 NBCC award in poetry. She co-edited Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing, published by Counterpath Press. A CantoMundo Fellow, she teaches in the creative writing programs at New Mexico State University while serving as the publisher of Noemi Press.

Valerie Martínez is an award-winning poet, educator, activist, and collaborative artist. Her book-length poem, Each and Her(winner of the 2012 Arizona Book Award), was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Open Book Award, the William Carlos William Award, and the Ron Ridenhour Prize. Her poetry has been widely published in journals, anthologies, and media outlets including American Poetry Review, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, The Best American Poetry, the Washington Post, and The Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Everywhere series. Valerie has more than twenty years of experience as a university professor. For the past ten years, she has been working with multidisciplinary artist teams through a wide range of arts and community development projects. She is the Founding Director of Artful Life which works to transform communities through the beauty and power of collaborative art. Learn more at www.valeriemartinez.net. "A Hundred Little Mouths” was commissioned and originally published in chapbook form for the Crowing Hens Whistling Project, directed by visual and performance artist Susan Silton. for SITE Santa Fe’s 20th anniversary event, November 7, 2015.

In 1998, after a ten-year residence in Spain, Francisco Aragón began a period of activity that included his own literary output, editing, translating, and curating. In 2003 he joined the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS) at the University of Notre Dame, where he founded Letras Latinas, the ILS’ literary initiative. In 2010, he was awarded the Outstanding Latino/a Cultural Arts, Literary Arts and Publications Award by the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education, and in 2015 a VIDO Award by VIDA, Women in the Literary Arts. A CantoMundo Fellow and member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop, Aragón is the author of Puerta del Sol (2005) and Glow of Our Sweat (2010) as well as editor of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (2007), these latter two winners of International Latino Book Awards. He teaches a course on Latino/a poetry at Notre Dame in the fall and directs Letras Latinas in Washington DC in the spring and summer. For more: franciscoaragon.net . "Unknown Distances" first appeared in Nepantlaand was written as part of PINTURA:PALABRA, a project in ekphrasis.

October 13, 2016

October cuts furrows of cloud in the Salvadoran sky as papier mache skeletons dance on our mantle, mariachi band of the dead in a glittering box, and a votive of la Virgen de Guadalupe draped in her green cloak next to the American pumpkin we’ve yet to carve. On this Day of the Dead, my children return from a piñata with two baby chicks dyed lime green and tangerine—a strange fad in party favors in El Salvador. The children squeal, watching the chicks rush about, like wind-up toys their beaks open and shut on crumbs of bread, gullets twitch as they swallow water, and tuck their heads into a wing—a bare bulb for mother’s warmth. The next day, we return from ballet class to find one pitched across the newsprint with legs rigid as a cartoon’s. And when the kids ask for a burial ceremony, already the other chick is staggering, asleep at the wheel and suddenly peeping. My daughter strokes the chick’s walnut head and says, Ok, Mami, I’ll go play while you wait for it to die. So I sit at the kitchen table, the limp bird hammocked in my hand—and with each breath I think—this is it, this is the last, and no, another breath—just as the children at bedtime lean into me with plumes of sweet breath, their limbs jerk as they approach the edge—as I hope this is—that they will abandon themselves to sleep, but again they turn and grip me tighter. Outside these four walls is my hot bath, the soup in the pot, a chapter, my other life. So I wish for the bird’s last breath—how like matchsticks are his bones. Now there is no return to the dancing skeletons in their glittering box—this is where I am supposed to dim the lights, and yet I have to describe how my daughter broke a branch of purple bougainvillea, point out that my son scooped up the dead bird and pitched him into the hole in the earth as one would toss a paper cup into a wastebasket, that it was 8pm on a school night and they stood like statues as they clutched my hands and whimpered Angel de la Guardia, the only prayer they know by heart. It ends like this: my children came alive again when it was time to pat down the shoveled dirt—but the next day they did not paint the stones to mark the graves as they had promised.

Co-founder of Kalina press, Alexandra Lytton Regalado is the author, editor, or translator of ten Central American-themedbooks. Her poems and short stories have appeared in cream city review, Gulf Coast, Narrative, NANO Fiction, Notre Dame Review, OCHO, Puerto del Sol and elsewhere. Her full-length collection of poems, Matria, (Black Lawrence Press) is forthcoming in 2017. She is the winner of the St. Lawrence Book Prize, the Coniston Poetry Prize, and her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She has a black belt in Kenpo Karate and lives in El Salvador with her husband and three children. "La Gallina" was first published in Radar Poetry.

October 09, 2016

off the back of his neck. There's another, a second man:He's in the very next chair,

also having his neck, the upper regions of his back,shaved.

He is bigger, less effete than the first & no doubtthat is why, across

the shop's full-length mirrors, the second man is shootingthe first

a look full of the hostility two lycanthropes feel,one for the other,

when first they sniff each other out.Still, in hairy, recurring dreams they're bound

to find themselves,just the two of them

in a dark wood where they will once more expose theirfangs to each other, & then,

their puny arms having become legs, clawed & roughly padded,

their bodies having become far more the same than different, they will run,

they will run & run & they will not stop running until their tongues hang down.

And they will do it again—they will run & run & run—the very next time

the moon grows full.

Steven Cordova is the author of Long Distance (Bilingual Review Press, 2010), and his poems have appeared in many journals & anthologies, including Bellevue University Press, Callaloo, and Northwest Review. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. "Lycanthropes in Love" was first published in The Good Men Project.

September 13, 2016

The eighth season of the Mission Poetry Seriesopens with a reading on Saturday, September 17, at 1 p.m. at Antioch University Santa Barbara.

“The Ringing and the Bell: Three Poets in Autumn” features three award-winning California poets: Mary Brown, William Archila, and Catherine Abbey Hodges. The title of the event is taken from a poem by Barry Spacks, a beloved Santa Barbara poet who is widely admired and who served as the city’s inaugural poet laureate from 2005 to 2007.

The reading will be held at Antioch University Santa Barbara • 602 Anacapa Street • Santa Barbara, CA• and is free and open to the public. The event offers complimentary broadsides, refreshments, and poets’ books for sale. The Mission Poetry Series is hosted by program director Emma Trelles and production coordinator Mark Zolezzi.

April 17, 2015

The sixth season of the Mission Poetry Series wraps up on Saturday, April 18, at 1 p.m. at Antioch University Santa Barbara.

“People, Earth, Sky, Stars: Two Poets in Spring” features nationally-acclaimed poet Denise Duhamel and San Francisco poet and activist Paul Fericano, one of the original founders of the series. The title of the reading is taken from a poem by Frank O’Hara, a New York School poet and an aesthetic mentor to both readers.

The reading will be held at Antioch University Santa Barbara, 602 Anacapa Street, Santa Barbara, CA, and is free and open to the public. The reading will also offer complimentary broadsides, refreshments, and poets’ books for sale by Chaucer’s Bookstore.

The Mission Poetry Series and its program director Emma Trelles is also excited to welcome long-time Santa Barbara resident and author Melinda Palacio as a curator.

December 24, 2014

1. After an entire lifetime in South Florida, I now live 3,000 miles away on the central coast of California, in a small city ringed by mountains and bordered by a Pacific which appears paler and vaster than the Caribbean-Atlantic I have always known. This is where I hear that the Cuban embargo is unraveling, the news a fragment floating from my car radio right before I turn off the ignition to trundle groceries from the trunk to our garden apartment. The U.S. will further ease travel restrictions to the island, open an embassy, lift some trade and banking sanctions. It is as if a mythic bird has winged overhead and I’ve only caught a glimpse of a few bright feathers. My first thought is what was that? It doesn’t really register.

2. I get busy putting away eggs and carrots grown at nearby farms. But the news keeps simmering somewhere inside me, a place as intrinsic to me as my ardor for lists or the invisible work of my lungs. It is the tiny island of Cubania I have carried within me since I was a child, born in the U.S. and trying to belong in Miami, a city that, in the 70s, still viewed my Cuban family and so many other recent immigrants as outsiders, no matter how quickly we learned English and how hard we worked.

3. As a young girl, I saw Fidel Castro as the camouflaged villain standing between the rotary phone in our kitchen and my family in Havana, whom we could only talk to briefly and on rare occasion. I’d shout in Spanish over the crackle of lines and wonder what their faces looked like. We didn’t have any pictures of them. When I eavesdropped on talk of Castro’s demise, a long-cherished topic in Miami, I imagined a scene much like the one in the The Wizard of Oz, where an oppressor is felled with one crashing stroke. Everyone is giddy and sings in three-part harmonies. A land returns to color, and instead of shoes, two black boots would curl and crumble to dust.

4. I think about this part of my childhood when I think of Cubans on the true island-nation, who, like we once did, have begun their own migration from perceived outcasts to rightful neighbors, with whom we share bloodlines and friendships and a percussive, slangy Spanish. I'm not talking about those who created a palm-fringed prison of the body and its free will. I mean the everyday Cubans who have kept on keeping on. Their relentless optimism and resourcefulness are at the core of Cubanía, something that is also seen in the micro, self-written psalm of my people: Todo se resuelve. Everything will work out.

5. In my imagined island of Cubanía, there is a little boat anchored near the shore and a blue-striped cabana on the beach. It contains a crazy-quilt of culture:

* a garden of white roses and un hombre sincero (first known as José Martí);

*dichos in Spanish like eso es un arroz con mango (Literal meaning: This is a plate of rice and mango. True meaning: What a mess) and tienes que echar pa'lante (Literally: You must move forward. Truly: Never give up);

*my mother's voice, which can sound like a chime or a siren, depending on the topic of conversation (Chime: I am so proud of you, mima. Siren: Please don't talk to me about Obama).

6. My mother, a Cuban-born American, is intensely Republican, and I am an American-born Cuban and a progressive. When our president won his second term, my mother told my brother she couldn't talk to me for a few days because she didn't want to hear me gloat and because she couldn't bear to see this country go down the same socialist-communist road that Cuba had traveled for more than five decades. My mother confiding to my brother, who passes it along to me, all of this over the phone, because, in my family, a conversation so intimate is unbearable to hold in person. Another Cubanía: Do not confront a person you love with your truthful unpleasantries but freely discuss with others, who will then share them on your behalf.

7. The god of the crossroads stands in a brilliant thicket of green. In my favorite painting by Wifredo Lam, the Afro-Cuban modernist, the deity also known as Elegua in the Santería faith spreads his cloak around a host of horned heads and leaves, an assembly of watchful eyes.

8. My friends and I, or at least those of us excited by the news, have burned up our phones and laptops with Cuba jabber: articles and songs and old photographs posted and shared; written responses on blogs and magazines; talk of how it all arrived on the 17th, the feast day of Babalú Ayé, the Santería counterpart to San Lázaro, the Spanish-Catholic saint of healing. We parsed the president’s speech and how, in what my friend Dan Vera called “a baller move,” Obama quoted José Martí, the 19th-century poet-journalist-activist who fought hard to liberate Cubans from Spanish rule and whose words are often invoked by both island communists and exiles as a tribute to independence. “Liberty is the right for every man to be honest,” said Martí, “to think and speak without hypocrisy.”

9. I have spoken to my mother about Christmas plans and presents, what time we will Skype. We have not discussed Cuba yet. It might take years. We are both the Great Avoiders and neither one of us wants to tear into this ticking box because we love each other more than we revile one another’s politics. And while I have found many of her other stances infuriating, I can only feel a kind of protectiveness towards her now, towards all exiles who are pro-embargo. After living in our community for so long, I understand what is at stake for my mother, for so many. They are losing everything all over again. To them, normalizing relations with the Cuban government means the Castros not only stole all they loved — they finally got away with it.

10. Because I am a poet, and thus, a hoarder of images, I kept a notebook that catalogued the details of my farewells before I moved to Santa Barbara from South Florida: the ibis that flashed white while they flew by our windows each dusk, how my brother rocks forward when he’s laughing hard, friends cooking dinner or playing guitars. It felt important to write down what would no longer be in short reach, but I was hardly engulfed in sorrow. How would I feel if I knew I might not see any of it again? What do I know about that kind of heartbreak? Not much.

11. Empirical fact: There is no one as patriotic as an immigrant-turned-citizen. When I visited Miami in

photo by Charles Trainor, Miami Herald

November, I overheard two Latinas at the car rental discussing plumbing problems. In Spanish and English, they shrugged it off and noted how in this country, that kind of thing was easy to resolver. Both nodded their heads in unison and shared a mmmmm-hhhmm. Subtext: The U.S. rules. In South Florida, Cubans, Haitians, Dominicans, and Venezuelans fly their American flags right alongside the flags of their birthplace, staked on the porches of their homes or flapping from their cars. Their chit-chat is an intricate brocade of English and their first tongue, often in the same sentence, their meals a patchwork of, say, barbecue hamburgers served up with yucca and the ubiquitous rice and beans. In July, my mother texted all of her friends and family to celebrate the anniversary of her arrival to this country. “52 years in the good ole USA,” she tapped. “The best country in the world.” I’ve heard the latter six words from so many immigrants; I’ve lost count.

12. Perhaps assimilation, in its realest sense, is not an obliteration of the past, but the making of a new kind of space, one that holds what “was” in the same open hands with what “is.” At 14medio, an independent online daily launched in Cuba, dissident and writer Yoani Sanchez reported Cubans blowing kisses at President Obama when his announcement was televised in Havana. “Now and again the cry of “I LOVE…” (in English!) could be heard from around the corner.” Are these the beginnings of Cubans and exiles stitching a new embroidery, a cautious piecing together of here and there, them and us, what happened with what we all might become? After half a century that also feels like the quick flick of a wand, I am hopeful. We are moving towards one another again.

June 15, 2014

In Miami the ocean behaves like a painting, diversity like an artist’s brushstrokes on a canvas, the immigrant like a dreamer. Swaying like a northerly, “Our America: TheLatino Presence in American Art”— a powerful art exhibit curated by E. Carmen Ramos and a permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum — made the second stop on its national tour in the temperate landscape of South Florida.

I felt at home around these brilliant writers whose work I had previously read but who now sat next to me, taking down notes and preparing to give me feedback on my ekphrastic pieces. With these poets, I knelt on the floor to engage with a sculpture, or I hopped imperceptibly to establish a relationship of movement with a large painting. I also laid flat on the floor to re-appreciate certain lines and photographed myself against any piece that could reflect me. Throughout, I maintained mental discussions with a sculpture (Luis Jiménez’s Man on Fire) and with how I could offer it a poem. "How do you want me to read your nakedness?" I asked.

"How can I be your medium?" Each time I received a different answer.

Through rich exchanges with my fellow poets, I found out some of them had received a newfound creative jolt from the exhibit and this project. We were provided with context and outside materials to help us consider, for example, each work as a cultural artifact or a visual text. My creative productivity increased since I, too, found myself a part of an inclusive community of Latino writers — a community seldom seen while I was growing up in Allapattah, Florida, but which is currently burgeoning in Miami through a wide range of projects and festivals, such as the O, Miami poetry festival.

Spending time with the exhibit itself, the poetry we were assigned to read, the theoretical essays we analyzed, and what we ultimately produced allowed us to discuss ekphrastic poetry as an exchange that occurs in translation, the body, sensuality, gender, borderlands, Spanglish, diaspora, and family.

Lotería-Tabla Llena (1972), by Carmen Lomas Garza

Trelles found ways to engage us with the artwork and with the work of other poets who have embarked on similar journeys. She gave us an outstanding bibliography to understand what we were there to produce. Suddenly, we developed the perspicacity to unravel multifarious tensions between Latino vs. Latinidad, Latino vs. Art, Poetry vs.Class; Creation vs. History, Identity vs. Perception, Culture vs. Ontology. And respond respond to the artwork we did!

Weeks before I witnessed it in person, I gravitated — almost out of submission — towards Luis Jiménez’s Man on Fire, a robust fiberglass sculpture first unveiled in 1969. The figure’s size, gloss, color distribution, and

themes of sacrifice, martyrdom and sexuality all appealed to me. These factors enabled me to reconnect with my own past as well. I went to art school when I was a child, but because of money and stigma, I was never able to properly fulfill that dream. This exhibit reminded me that as a poet, I am also an artist. Man on Fire, a take on the Aztec ruler Cuauhtémoc, whose death is recontextualized as a protest emblem against the Vietnam War, helped me reflect on how my mother emigrated from Honduras and my stepfather from Cuba, and how countless of lives are lost in the pursuit of concretizing a dream. Jiménez’s figure stands as tall as a rock ‘n’ roll star, but his skin melts under tragedy and memory’s burden. He’s pride and suffering, simultaneously.

Elia Alba is another artist whose photography I found arresting; she celebrates and further complicates identity in her work. Her Larry Levan-inspired pictures, forinstance, depict different people wearing masks of Levan’s face. Levan was an American DJ, a pioneer of house music, and a staple of New York City’s nightclub scene. Alba highlights Levan’s interplay of genres to show that identity is always shifting, forever reveling in contradiction.

As a gay Latino poet who writes from the margins, I find in Alba’s work a Latino community whose makeup is defined by oppositions, conquests, and confusion, and whose lives are a daily negotiation through them. Alba and Jiménez are just a few artists in this exhibit whose work demonstrates precisely the diversity of our Latino perspectives.

Of course, diversity is a condition that goes beyond exteriors, and through “Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art” and “PINTURA:PALABRA” I have discovered much more potential in my writing. I have also developed more pride in the work of my fellow writers and pride for those artists who constantly try to overcome innumerable challenges to celebrate our numerous traditions. Latinos have an important voice in the United States and these brief but fertile exchanges remind us of that.

Roy G. Guzmán is a Honduran-American poet whose work has appeared in The Acentos Review, BorderSenses, Compose, Drunken Boat, NonBinary Review, and Red Savina Review.

He received his BA from the University of Chicago and his MA from Dartmouth. A Florida resident, he will be pursuing his MFA this fall at the University of Minnesota.

April 02, 2014

In the quest for a happier, better informed NaPoMo, The Tropical Roundup has returned. This is essentially where I post random or thematically or geographically linked tidbits from Poetry Land. Or culled from news, music, art, gossip, and other realms. Or simply netted from my aquarium brain. "Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it."

**The Mission Poetry Series wraps up its 5th season this Saturday, April 5th, at 1 p.m. with a new partnership with Antioch University Santa Barbara and with "April Voices: Three Poets for the Spring of It," featuring Teddy Macker, Phil Taggart, and Friday Lubina. Offering two readings each year in September and April, the series was founded in 2009 by poet and author Paul Fericano, (who also writes a regular column for The Santa Barbara Independent), and Susan Blomstad, a religious sister in the Order of St. Francis and the former director of the Mission Renewal Center in Santa Barbara.

** In other Santa Barbara poetry news: Inaugural poet (and all-around nice guy) Richard Blanco popped into The Book Den recently to say hello and sign his inspiring new book: For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet's Journey.

The Book Den is one of California's oldest bookstores and stocks a bounty of new, used, and out-of-print books. Shop indie, folks. It tastes good.

** Over on Barbara Jane Reyes' Poeta y Diwata blog, the Oakland-based poet serves up yet another thoughtful post in which she considers the evolution of her latest poetry project ("And the word was a woman....") along with the complexities of allusion, form, and language. Here's an excerpt:

"...we stretch from our initial frames into others’ frames. We build from our foundations and into the cultures that surround us, and which we now inhabit. As a poet frequently referenced for my code switching/operating in multiple registers, this is a no brainer; there’s a language that’s introduced itself into my repertoire. As poets, we sponge up languages, from everywhere." Read the full post here.

**And, from the unconfirmed, but no-less enticing, rumor bog: The winner of the 2014 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize hails from California! A full announcement with the poet's name and details is slated for April 14 at the University of Notre Dame reading featuring 2012 winner Laurie Anne Guerrero(A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying) and prize judge and poet Francisco X. Alarcón. The Letras Latinas blog will post all the good news later that evening.The Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize supports the publication of a first book by a Latino/a poet in the United States, in collaboration with University of Notre Dame Press.

October 21, 2013

This Thursday, the Poetry Foundation will host two gifted Latino poets at its HQ for a reading, book signing, and reception: Dan Vera -- author of Speaking Wiri Wiri, which won the inaugural Letras Latinas/Red Hen Press prize-- and Orlando Ricardo Menes, who judged the contest and whose newest collection, Fetish, won last year's Prairie Schooner Book Prize.